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LINCOLN’S “HOUSE 
DIVIDED” SPEECH 


DID IT REFLECT A DOCTRINE 
OF CLASS STRUGGLE? 


AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE 
THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL 
SOCIETY ON MARCH 15, 1923 


By Arthur Charles Cole, Ph.D. 

Professor of American 'history 
Ohio State University 




THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 
CHICAGO ILLINOIS 







E 4-3 S' 



Copyright 1923 By 
Chicago Historical Society 


All Rights Reserved 


Published October 1923 




\ 


Composed and Printed By 
The University of Chicago Press 
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. 




INTRODUCTION 


This lecture is a by-product of research work in the fields 
of southern history and of Illinois history. Several years of 
effort at running down clues of varying significance are repre¬ 
sented in this little study. The author hopes that his results 
will be regarded by his brethren of the historical gild as 
worthy of the time and energy expended in such tasks. 

The author is impressed with an interesting parallelism 
between the reflections of Lincoln upon the slavery issue 
and the views of extreme pro-slavery propagandists. To be 
sure, the one represented the ideals of the North and of 
freedom while the others were contending for “ southern 
rights.” Lincoln’s conclusions can be shown to have been 
based to a large degree upon his reaction to the extremes of 
the pro-slavery argument. With such critics as feel that 
to attribute to these forces the immediate and sole inspiration 
for the “house divided” statement is too far-fetched, the 
author has no quarrel. He does believe that the evidence 
submitted warrants the conclusion that there was at least 
a subconscious influence working in that direction. 

Lincoln was in no sense a spokesman of labor-class con¬ 
sciousness. He was more the middle-class liberal influenced 
by the frontier to a strong human sympathy for those who 
were oppressed or threatened with oppression. Through 
the greater part of his career he was more the philosopher 
than the man of action. Indeed, his greatness must in large 
part rest upon the depth of his understanding. This paper 
raises the question as to whether or not Lincoln may have 
made some slight contribution to the materials for a philos¬ 
ophy of history. 














LINCOLN'S “HOUSE DIVIDED” SPEECH 

On that memorable day of June 17, 1858, when Abraham 
Lincoln was honored by the indorsement of his senatorial 
aspirations by the Illinois State Republican Convention, in 
a carefully prepared speech delivered without dependence 
upon manuscript or notes, he uttered these prophetic words: 

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this 
government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free. I 
do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to 
fall—but I do expect that it will cease to be divided. It will become 
all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will 
arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall 
rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advo¬ 
cates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the 
States, old as well as new, North as well as South. 1 

What then did Lincoln mean? That was the question 
that was raised at once by those who had committed them¬ 
selves to accepting his political generalship, 2 as well as by 
those who hoped to humble him—if possible to condemn 
him out of his own mouth. 

Lincoln's “house divided" doctrine is open to two inter¬ 
pretations : as constituting a prophecy that sought to pene¬ 
trate the mystery of the future on the basis of past and pres¬ 
ent forces, or a program for practical political endeavor. 
Both prophecy and political leadership may be grounded 
upon careful observation of things as they have come to be, 
or may rest upon nothing more substantial than fanatical 
enthusiasm and dauntless courage. 

1 Nicolay and Hay, Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln (new and enlarged 
edition, New York, 1905), III, 2. 

2 Gilbert A. Tracy, Uncollected Letters of Abraham Lincoln (Boston, 1917), 
p. 86; cf. also p. 132. 

5 





Contemporaries, startled by the apparent implications 
of the speech, were wont to assume that it furnished a goal 
for the revolutionary efforts of a reformer. Lincoln’s oppo¬ 
nents claimed against him proof of his participation in a 
propaganda to free all the slaves; thus would he do violence 
to the constitutional guaranties of the planter’s rights. His 
political rival, Stephen A. Douglas, sought to make him the 
spokesman of a sectional abolition Republicanism; the 
“little giant” challenged the “house divided” speech as in 
essence a plan to array section against section, to incite a 
war of extinction on “negro equality” ground. Lincoln 
seemed to have placed himself in the company of that arch 
apostle of “Black Republicanism,” William H. Seward; 
indeed, Seward almost simultaneously announced that the 
forces of freedom and slavery were coming together in an 
“irrepressible conflict.” 

At this stage it seems proper to state the role which Lin¬ 
coln had come to play in the antislavery movement. His 
record in no sense showed a disposition to join hands with 
those who sought the complete extinction of slavery. The 
young product of the Kentucky log cabin entered the politi¬ 
cal arena as a representative of the contemporary party of 
“wealth, intelligence, and respectability.” He did not, 
however, completely share the natural disgust of the proper¬ 
tied classes for the frontier brand of democracy of which he 
was so much a part. Essentially a middle-of-the-roader in 
his attitude toward slavery, he declared in his famous protest 
of 1837 that “the institution of slavery is founded on both 
injustice and bad policy, but that the promulgation of aboli¬ 
tion doctrines tends rather to increase than abate its evils.” 1 

He could not even understand the militant idealists who 
were content to ignore even political methods in their 
attempts to arouse the conscience of the slaveholder to a 


1 Nicolay and Hay, op. cit., 1 ,51-52. 



sense of the guilt of holding a human brother in bondage. 
Lincoln did not appreciate, till his own decrepit party was tot¬ 
tering with premature senility, the importance of a political 
alignment on the slavery issue. He scorned the Free Soil 
Party as offering wares, like the Yankee peddler’s pantaloons, 
“ large enough for any man, small enough for any boy,” yet 
the charge could as truthfully have been made against the 
ambidextrous organization to which he still proudly clung. 
His uncompromising hostility to the spread of slavery made 
his leadership strongly desired by those who wished to utilize 
the popular reaction against the Kansas-Nebraska Act to 
organize a new political party. Yet in October, 1854, the 
wily Whig leader left Springfield for the open prairies of cen¬ 
tral Illinois to escape a possible connection with the Republi¬ 
can Convention, called together by the antislavery idealists, 
and later repudiated the unauthorized use of his name on 
the Republican State Committee. The decadence of the 
Whig Party soon left him free for a new political alignment, 
and the logic of events led him into a prominent part in the 
Republican movement. His purpose, however, was to con¬ 
trol it and to direct it along conservative lines. In the storm 
and stress of Civil War, he was reluctant about adopting 
abolition ground. Even after he had assumed responsibility 
for an emancipation policy, and had passed on to his reward, 
he was exposed to the scornful words of an abolition crusader 
from Massachusetts: “Lincoln was an emancipationist by 

compulsion.Lincoln was made a saint and liberator 

in spite of himself; he was cuffed into the calendar; he was 
kicked into glory.” 1 

Soon after his Springfield speech, Lincoln became very 
much annoyed—he said in one case, “mortified”—at the 
way in which his friends seemed to construe his speech. To 
John L. Scripps, the Chicago journalist and his first biog- 


1 Columbus Crisis , January 24, 1866. 

7 




rapher, he wrote a careful correction on June 23, six days 
after the delivery of the speech. He tried to make it 
entirely clear that he had not asserted or even intimated “ any 
power or purpose, to interfere with slavery in the states 
where it exists. 7 ’ 1 Similar efforts to clarify his position were 
forced from him by Douglas in the great duel which they 
fought over the state of Illinois. Yet, a period as late as 
February, i860, found Lincoln still vexed by uncertainties as 
to his position. He wrote in reply to an inquiry: 

It puzzles me to make my meaning plainer. Look over it care¬ 
fully and conclude I meant all I said, and did not mean anything I did 
not say, and you will have my meaning. Douglas attacked me upon 
this, saying it was a declaration of war between the slave and free 
states. You will perceive, I said no such thing, and I assure you I 
thought of no such thing. If I had said I believe the Government 
cannot last always half-slave and half-free, would you understand it 
any better than you do ? Endure permanently and last always have 
exactly the same meaning. 2 

Little direct evidence remains to indicate Lincoln’s exact 
intention in planning his famous utterance. The idea, 
whatever his purpose in exploiting it, was not new to him. 
Nearly three years before, in a letter that carefully analyzed 
the state of the slavery controversy, he concluded: “Our 
political problem now is, ‘Can we as a nation continue 
together permanently—forever—half-slave and half-free? 7 
The problem is too mighty for me—may God, in his mercy, 
superintend the solution. 7 ’ 3 He is said to have incorporated 
his negative answer to this question in his speech at the 
Bloomington convention which organized the Republican 
Party in Illinois, but to have abandoned its later use in 
deference to the protests of certain party leaders who 
objected to the implications of his statement. 4 The value 

1 Tracy, Uncollected Letters of Abraham Lincoln , pp. 86-87. 

2 Ibid., pp. 132-33. 3 Nicolay and Hay, op. cit., II, 280-81. 

4 William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, Herndon's Lincoln (3 vols. Chicago, 
1890), II, 398-99; Ward H. Lamon, Life of Abraham Lincoln (Boston, 1872), p. 398. 

8 





of this evidence is to suggest that the “house divided” idea 
was developed independently of the remaining remarks of 
the Springfield speech. 

Herndon leaves an account of the circumstances of the 
writing of the speech. Various memoranda were made on 
stray envelopes and scraps of paper and stowed away in his 
hat, until he was at length able to prepare a connected speech. 
While making his draft he refused to submit it to Jesse K. 
Dubois, a party associate, because, as he is said to have later 
explained to Dubois: “I knew that if I read the passage 
about the ‘house divided against itself’ to you, you would 
ask me to change or modify it, and that I was determined 
not to do. I had willed it so, and was willing to perish with 
it.” 1 In advance of his speech, however, he seems to have 
submitted it to Herndon and later to a dozen or more friends. 
At first, Herndon says, he raised the question whether it was 
wise or politic to utilize the celebrated figure of speech; 
Lincoln replied that it was “the truth of all human experi¬ 
ence for six thousand years,” and that he was ready to stand 
or fall politically upon that ground. In the later conference, 
each person criticized the remark as at least ahead of the 
time, until finally in his turn Herndon said: “Lincoln, deliver 
that speech as read, and it will make you president.” 2 It is 
scarcely necessary to point out that this testimony—aside 
from the question of its dependability—contributes little to 
the question of the implications of the Springfield speech. 

Lincoln always interpreted this Springfield utterance as 
an essay in the realm of prophecy. Prophets everywhere 
were scanning the political horizon, and some read the signs 
with the same prescience that time has shown that Lincoln 

1 Ibid., p. 397 and note. 

3 Ibid., p. 400. Herndon assumes that by this speech Lincoln “drove the nail 
into Seward’s political coffin.” But Lincoln’s strength in i860 was still clearly 
that of a middle-ground candidate. See also account of John Armstrong, in 
Lamon, Life of Abraham Lincoln, pp. 398-99. 

9 





displayed. He held with Seward that the radically different 
political systems of the North and the South, separated by 
Mason and Dixon’s line and its continuation, were headed 
for a collision. Both Seward and Lincoln prophesied that in 
due course the nation would “cease to be divided.” Said 
Lincoln: 

Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, 
and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is 
in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward 
till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, 
North as well as South. 

Seward was much more explicit; said he: 

Either the cotton and rice fields of South Carolina and the sugar 
plantations of Louisiana will ultimately be tilled by free labor, and 
Charleston and New Orleans become marts for legitimate merchandise 
alone, or else the rye-fields and wheat-fields of Massachusetts and New 
York must again be surrendered by their farmers to slave culture and 
to the production of slaves, and Boston and New York become once 
more markets for trade in the bodies and souls of men. 

Lincoln presumed that he was merely calling attention 
to two forces contending with each other for supremacy. 
He even assumed a certain degree of impartiality, if not indif¬ 
ference, to the outcome. “I did not even say that I desired 
that slavery should be put in course of ultimate extinction,” 
he explained; in the favorable antislavery atmosphere of 
Chicago he could safely add: “I do say so now, however.” 1 
That the South was on the defensive and its “ peculiar insti¬ 
tution” threatened by forces in the North is perfectly clear; 
but were the free institutions of the North endangered to 
any such degree as suggested by both Lincoln and Seward ? 

Back of Lincoln’s prophecy that slavery might come to 
be legalized in the northern free states as well as in the 
South, there seems to lie his reaction to two political cur- 

1 Nicolay and Hay, op. cit., Ill, 32. 

10 



rents. Openly and definitely he refers to a conspiracy in 
which the Supreme Court is the agency for the spread of 
slavery by judicial decision, not only into the territories but 
perhaps even “into the free states themselves.” 1 The recent 
action of the Supreme Court in the case of Dred Scott was 
but one fragment of a mountain of evidence which revealed 
a design to make slavery national. He reasoned: 

Put this and that together and we have another nice little niche, 
which we may, ere long, see filled with another Supreme Court 
decision, declaring that the Constitution of the United States does 

not permit a State to exclude slavery from its limits.We shall 

lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the 
verge of making their State free, and we shall awake to the reality 
instead that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State. 

But would this be more than a victory for slavery in 
principle? Lincoln doubtless believed with Douglas and 
other public men of the day that negro slavery could never 
thrive in the West, as in the North, because of unfavorable 
crops and climatic conditions. This danger then in itself 
would scarcely seem to warrant Lincoln’s deduction. An¬ 
other factor was present, lurking in the background, 
perhaps, but influencing Lincoln, consciously or subcon¬ 
sciously, in his presentation of the struggle between slavery 
and freedom. This was his belief that nothing less was in 
danger than “the white man’s charter of freedom, the declar¬ 
ation that ‘all men are created free and equal.’” 

This idea was first voiced by Lincoln in his famous eulogy 
on Henry Clay of July 16, 1852—perhaps the first speech 
to reveal in Lincoln the qualities of a great thinker and orator. 
He approved of Clay’s position of middle ground between 
the abolitionists and the pro-slavery fire-eaters: 

Those who would shiver into fragments the Union of these States, 
tear to tatters its now venerated Constitution, and even burn the last 


x ibid., p. 12 ; Gilbert A. Tracy, Uncollected Letters of Abraham Lincoln , p. 86. 




/ 


copy of the Bible, rather than slavery should continue a single hour, 
together with all their more halting sympathizers, have received, and 
are receiving, their just execration; and the name and opinions and 
influence of Mr. Clay are fully and, as I trust, effectually and endur- 
ingly arrayed against them. But I would also, if I could, array his 
name, opinions, and influence against the opposite extreme—against 
a few but an increasing number of men who, for the sake of perpetuat¬ 
ing slavery, are beginning to assail and to ridicule the white man’s 
charter of freedom, the declaration that “all men are created free and 
equal.” 1 

The same train of thought ran through Lincoln’s later 
utterances and writings. More and more clearly he saw 
the danger that came from the more fanatical advocates of 
slavery, as they tended to adopt offensive instead of defen¬ 
sive tactics. With the break-up of the Whig Party—that 
conservative bulwark against extremes of sectionalism—he 
saw his former associates, especially in the South, yielding 
more and more to their aversion to abolition fanaticism. 
This strengthened the hands of those who were advocating 
a defensive and offensive alliance of the forces of capitalism, 
North and South. It was to be an alignment of southern 
slavocracy and northern commercial and financial interests 
against enslaved labor in the South and the poorer orders of 
society in the North. 2 Southern ridicule of the white man’s 
charter of freedom, of the declaration that “all men are 
created free and equal,” found its echo in the North. Slavery 
was allying itself with plutocratic ideals and Lincoln felt 
the challenge of this development. 3 

In 1854 Lincoln showed his sense of obligation to this 
situation in various reflections. The challenge to the doc- 

1 Nicolay and Hay, op. cit ., II, 172-73. 

2 The new manufacturing interests of the North had to be left out, because of 
the traditional opposition of southern sectionalists to the protectionist demands 
of the manufacturers. 

3 See N. W. Stephenson, Lincoln , an Account of His Personal Life , etc. (Indian¬ 
apolis, 1922), p. 77. 


12 


trine of equality aroused him to comment in a fragment on 
slavery: “Equality in society beats inequality,” “whether 
the latter be of the British aristocratic sort or of the domes¬ 
tic slavery sort.” 1 In another fragment on the same topic 
he drove home the logic of the defense of slavery on the basis 
of color, of intellectual inferiority, or of self-interest; he 
showed that this line of argument can be pushed to the point 
of justifying the enslavement of the person using it upon 
contact with a person of lighter complexion, or of mental 
superiority, or with a sense of greater power and the right of 
exploitation. 2 In a conversation at about the same time he 
stressed the danger that slavery might spread into Illinois 
and the northern states until at length the whole country 
would have adopted it. The essence of slavery—a point 
that commended it to some but that aroused Lincoln to indig¬ 
nation—seemed to be a scornful sense of superority to labor. 3 

“The white man’s charter of freedom,” the Declaration 
of Independence, seemed threatened by a combination of 
forces in the North and South, and Lincoln brooded over the 
danger. In his well-known Peoria address, replying to 
Douglas on the Kansas-Nebraska issue, he pointed to the 
American gospel of liberty as the inspiration of “the liberal 
party throughout the world,” and issued a solemn warning: 
“In our greedy chase to make profit of the negro, let us 
beware lest we ‘cancel and tear to pieces’ even the white 
man’s charter of freedom.” 4 

In a speech delivered at a Republican banquet in Chicago, 
December io, 1856, Lincoln pointed out that a challenge 
had arisen to the necessary “central idea” in American polit¬ 
ical public opinion which until recently had been that of the 
founders of the nation—“the equality of men.” He explained: 

1 Nicolay and Hay, op. cit., II, 184. 

2 Ibid., p. 186. 3 Lamon, Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, pp. 346-47* 

4 Nicolay and Hay, op. cit., II, 247-48. 


13 





The late presidential election was a struggle by one party to dis¬ 
card that central idea and to substitute for it the opposite idea that 
slavery is right in the abstract, the workings of which as a central idea 
may be the perpetuity of human slavery and its extension to all coun¬ 
tries and colors. Less than a year ago the Richmond “Enquirer,” 
an avowed advocate of slavery, regardless of color, in order to favor 
his views, invented the phrase of “State equality,” and now the Presi¬ 
dent, in his message, adopts the “Enquirer’s” catch-phrase.” 

He closed with an appeal to “reinaugurate the good old 
‘central ideas’ of the republic,” to renew the declaration 
that “all men are created equal.” 1 Here then during the 
exact period when the “house divided” idea was taking 
form in Lincoln’s mind, there was developing this fear for 
the “white man’s charter of freedom.” 

Why did not Lincoln follow up this situation in his 
“house divided” speech? This is not an easy question to 
answer. His biblical text gave him an excellent foundation; 
what we find in the speech, however, is mainly a discussion 
of the danger to freedom from the leadership of Douglas and 
his party associates. But this was the immediate strategy 
of the situation. Douglas was facing the crisis of his career; 
he was at length encircled by his enemies, not only the 
Republicans but the Democratic machine and the National 
administration, with which he had been forced into a break; 
at the same time, he threatened by a brilliant stroke to win 
over the Republicans to his support. 2 Lincoln saw his 
opportunity and struck blow after blow upon his wily but 


1 Nicolay and Hay, op. cit., pp. 310-11. 

2 Horace Greeley was so impressed with Douglas’ “gallant and successful 
struggle” against the fraud of the Lecompton constitution that he suggested that 
“not only magnanimity, but policy dictated to the Republicans of Illinois that 
they should promptly and heartily tender their support to Mr. Douglas, and thus 
insure his re-election for a third term with substantial unanimity.”—Horace L. 
Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life (New York, 1868), p. 357. See also Cole, 
Era of the Civil War (Springfield, 1919), pp. 157-61. 

Indeed, Lincoln admitted in private to Herndon that Douglas, though 
“once a tool of the South,” was “now its enemy.”—Herndon and Weik, Herndon’s 
Lincoln , II, 391. 


14 



weakening opponent. As a result, his “ house divided” 
figure is a classic statement of the general logic of his posi¬ 
tion rather than a logical introduction to his combined attack 
upon Douglas and the Dred Scott Decision. It sounded the 
keynote of the Republican cause even though Lincoln turned 
abruptly to deal with the immediate situation at hand. 
Developed in Lincoln’s mind long before the remainder of 
the speech, it stands in comparative isolation in the text of 
his speech. 

Was it entirely fantastic to picture as an alternative to 
the ultimate extinction of negro servitude the possibility 
that slavery would eatablish itself in the domain of the 
North? Was this merely a “bogie” by which northerners 
might be frightened into the ranks of a party that stood 
unequivocally for the non-extension of slavery—a party 
that proclaimed by indirection that slavery was not even a 
necessary evil but a crime against humanity? Could evi¬ 
dence be cited to support this contention, which, however 
inadequate when judged in perspective by a scientific his¬ 
torian, might have bulked large in contemporary hopes and 
fears ? 

Lincoln had referred to “the increasing number of men 
who, for the sake of perpetuating slavery, are beginning to 
assail and ridicule the white man’s charter of freedom, the 
declaration that ‘all men are created free and equal.’” He 
was right. In his first warning in 1852 he added: 

So far as I have learned, the first American of any note to do or 
attempt this was the late John C. Calhoun; and if I mistake not, it 
soon after found its way into some of the messages of the Governor of 
South Carolina. 

He also pointed to a widely published letter of a “very dis¬ 
tinguished and influential clergyman of Virginia” rejecting 
the maxim of Jefferson which had come to be “almost 
universally regarded as canonical authority.” There was 


15 


now an increasing tendency among certain southerners to 
reject the equalitarian doctrines of the Declaration of Inde¬ 
pendence and substitute for it the philosophy that slavery 
was desirable for laborers generally. For, long before the 
day of Karl Marx, the concept of the “class struggle” found 
specific recognition on American soil. 

What, indeed, was more natural than that the spokesman 
of the southern slavocrats should develop a political philos¬ 
ophy suitable to the protection of their interests? John 
C. Calhoun, the undisputed champion of southern rights in 
the earlier period of the sectional controversy, had such an 
underlying philosophy. In studying the history of the past, 
he claimed that he could not find u a wealthy and civilized 
society in which one portion of the community did not, in 
point of fact, live on the labor of the other.” Continuing 
his reasoning, he stated: 

There is and always has been in an advanced stage of wealth and 
civilization a conflict between labor and capital. The condition of 
society in the South exempts us from the disorders and dangers result¬ 
ing from this conflict; and which explains why it is that the political 
situation of the slave-holding States has been so much more stable and 
quiet than that of the North. 1 

In confidential talks with northern representatives of prop¬ 
erty and privilege, he condoled with them over their inability 
to repress the white laboring class, whose “ number and dis¬ 
orderly temper will make them in the end efficient enemies 
of the men of property.They will increase in influ¬ 

ence and desperation until they overturn you.” His inevit¬ 
able conclusion was: “Slavery is indispensable to a republi¬ 
can government. There cannot be a durable republican 
government without slavery.” 2 

1 Calhoun, Works , II, 631, 632; see also ibid., I, 56, 57. 

2 Chadwick, Causes of the Civil War, pp. 41, 42; see also Merriam, “Political 
Philosophy of John C. Calhoun,” Studies in Southern History and Politics, pp. 329-30. 

16 




Lincoln’s attention had also been drawn apparently to 
the message of Governor McDuffie, of South Carolina, and 
to later utterances of Governor Hammond. In the middle of 
the thirties, Governor McDuffie had officially declared his 
belief that slavery was the very cornerstone of the republic, 
that the laboring portion of any country, “bleached or 
unbleached,” was a dangerous element in the body politic; 
he prophesied that twenty-five years would find the laboring 
people of the North virtually reduced to slavery. 

The most logical development of a comprehensive system 
of thought in defense of slavery came from the intelligentsia 
of the South, from the teachers and the preachers. The 
outstanding influence was that of Thomas R. Dew, president 
of William and Mary College. By the middle of the thirties 
his reflections had taken on definite, if not permanent, form. 
He led his section in the bold repudiation of the equal itarian 
teachings of the Declaration of Independence, sacred in 
the South to the memory of Thomas Jefferson. With him 
was associated the Reverend William A. Smith, president 
of Randolph-Macon College, who first developed his ideas 
in a course of lectures on “Domestic Slavery in the United 
States,” delivered to his classes in moral science. Addi¬ 
tional co-workers were found, such as Professor P. H. Mills, 
of Mercer University, and other nameless figures who worked 
more quietly in the background. 1 Dew and his associates 
were frequently called upon to present their conclusions in 
addresses on various public occasions; in time they were 
widely distributed through the medium of the printed page. 

1 George Fitzhugh refers to “Professor H. of Virginia” as a keen and aggressive 
thinker along these lines. Cannibals All! or, Slaves without Masters (Richmond, 
1:857), pp. ix-xi. This may have been George F. Flolmes—1846, professor of 
mathematics and natural science in Baptist College at Richmond; 1847-48, pro¬ 
fessor of economy, belles-lettres, and history at William and Mary; 1848-49, presi¬ 
dent of the University of Mississippi, from which he retired on account of ill health; 
1857-97, professor of history and literature at the University of Virginia. See 
South in the Building of the Nation (13 vols., Richmond, 1909-13), XI, 505. 


1 7 



Dew led off in the attack upon the Jefferson creed of 
human equality. Soon the challenge was general. “The 
opponents of slavery,” wrote Professor Mill, “lay much stress 
upon the dogma that all men are created free and equal. 
. . . . I have no hesitation in pronouncing it false and 
absurd; and I have ample means of proving my assertion.” 1 
Or, as President Smith put it: “To be ‘hewers of wood and 
drawers of water’ in unequal and subordinate positions, to 
the few , has been the lot of mankind from the time of Adam. 
. . . . Inequality among men is the will of God.” 2 The 
Reverend Thornton Stringfellow, of Richmond, Virginia, 
undertook to prove that the biblical statutes “show, very 
clearly, that our Creator is the author of social, moral, and 
political inequality among men.” 3 According to Chancellor 
Harper, the distinguished South Carolina jurist, slavery was 
“a principal cause” of civilization: “Slavery alone is ade¬ 
quate to form man to habits of labor.He who has 

obtained command of another’s labor, first begins to accumu¬ 
late and provide for the future, and the foundations of civili¬ 
zation are laid.” 4 This unequivocal doctrine of class in¬ 
equality was a gospel of government by and for the privileged 
few, not for the sake of government but for the sake of 
privilege and its protection. The significant point was that 
men like Calhoun were ready to apply their doctrine to the 
free as well as to the slave states. Calhoun wished to bolster 
up the institution of slavery by appealing to the privileged 
groups of the North to see that they were no less interested 

in “taking from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.” 

» 

1 P. H. Mill, Slavery: a Treatise Showing That Slavery Is Neither a Moral f 

Political , nor Social Evil (Penfield, Georgia, 1844). 

3 William A. Smith, Lectures on the Philosophy and Practice of Slavery (Nash¬ 
ville, 1856), pp. 62, 63. 

3 Thornton Stringfellow, Scriptural and Statistical View of Slavery , p. 97. 

4 William Harper et al ., Pro-slavery Argument (Charleston, 1852), pp. 3-4. 

18 




He wanted to strengthen the social line of cleavage, frankly 
admitting that it would doom thousands of northerners to 
generations of poverty and ignorance. 

In palliation of their own “peculiar institution/’ southern 
propagandists sometimes shed crocodile tears over the piti¬ 
ful condition of northern “slaves without masters.” They 
drew heart-rending pictures of men, women, and children 
engaged in prolonged monotonous toil under intolerable 
conditions and for starvation wages. They pointed to the 
wrecks of northern “free” industrial civilization in the alms¬ 
houses and asylums. Northern capitalism, they held, was 
slavery under the guise of freedom. For argumentative 
purposes they would admit that if slavery was a crime against 
humanity, it ought to be abolished everywhere and in every 
form; believing it a positive blessing, however, their logic 
covered a defense of even the “ wages-slavery ” of northern 
industrialism. Define slavery as a system which compels 
one man to support another out of the product of his labor, 
and Calhoun and his followers were propagandists for slav¬ 
ery regardless of race, color, or crime. And so many south¬ 
erners defined it. 1 

The apostles of negro slavery often conceded that the 
white slavery that prevailed in the North was the more 
profitable because the capitalist master had all of the advan¬ 
tages and none of the burdens of the ordinary slave-owner. 
They consoled themselves by pointing to the greater sta¬ 
bility of their institution, and altruistically referred to the 
more generous treatment and to the greater contentment of 

1 “If I should venture on a definition, I should say that where a man is com¬ 
pelled to labor at the will of another, and to give him much the greater portion of 
the product of his labor, there Slavery exists; and it is immaterial by what sort or 
compulsion the will of the laborer is subdued.”—Harper, Pro-slavery Argument, 
p. 52. “A system of slavery is a state or order of things established by law or 
custom, in which one set of men are the masters to a given extent, and another 
are slaves to that extent,” said President Smith, Philosophy and Practice of Slavery , 
p. 39. See also Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! or, Slaves without Masters, pp. 25 ff. 


19 



the negro slave. They realized also that northern capitalism 
and southern slavery rested upon a common foundation. 
“We find,” said one after a stinging criticism of northern 
industrialism, “that we shall have to defend the North as 
well as the South against the assaults of the abolitionist. 771 
Indeed, their most serious criticism of nominally free society 
seemed to be that it lacked a guaranty of stability. In 
America as in Europe discontent seemed to lurk among the 
propertyless masses who, “tantalized with the name of 
freedom/ 7 were already challenging the control of the privi¬ 
leged governing class. Chancellor Harper commented: 

That they are called free undoubtedly aggravates the suffering 
of the slaves of other regions. They see the economic inequality 
which exists, and feel their own misery, and can hardly conceive other¬ 
wise than that there is some injustice in the institutions of society to 
occasion these. They regard the apparently more fortunate class as 
oppressors.They feel indignity more acutely, and more of dis¬ 

content is excited; they feel that it is mockery that calls them free. 
Men do not so much hate and envy those who are separated from them 
by a wide distance, and some apparently impossible barrier, as those 
who approach nearer to their own condition, and with whom they 
habitually bring themselves into comparison . 1 2 

The logic of this argument meant that the South had less 
reason to fear servile insurrection than the North had to fear 
social revolution. 3 Governor J. H. Hammond, of South 
Carolina, thought in 1845 that the specter of revolt was on 
the very threshold of the North. Said he, closing the thesis 
that no society had ever existed without social classes: 

Though intelligence and wealth have great influence here [in the 
United States] as elsewhere, in keeping in check reckless and unen- 

1 Fitzhugh, op. cit., p. 61. 

2 Harper, op. cit., pp. 75-76. 

3 Ibid. See also W. Gilmore Sims, “The Morals of Slavery” in same volume, 
pp. 205-7, 221: “Perhaps there is nothing in the world that the people of the 
South less apprehend, than this, of the insurrection of their negroes.” See also 
“Professor Dew on Slavery” in the same volume, pp. 462 ff. 


20 



lightened numbers, yet it is evident to close observers, if not to all, 
that those are rapidly usurping all power in the non-slave-holding 
states, and threaten a fearful crisis in Republican institutions and that 
at no remote period. 

He prophesied that it would not be long before the free states 
would be compelled to introduce the standing army to over¬ 
awe the rampant and combatant “ spirit of discontent wher¬ 
ever nominal Free Labor prevails, with its extensive privi¬ 
leges and its dismal servitude.” 1 

At about the same time a Georgia prophet uttered the 
same warning; he was doubtful that 

Our Northern friends have any way to avoid the anarchy toward 

which they are fast tending.There is, at the present time, in 

the States north of Maryland, a well organized party, numbering in 
a single city, some thousands of voters, who are in favor ./ an equal 
division of property, and most clamorously demand it. Thanks to 
our system of domestic servitude, such influences cannot exist in our 
midst . 2 

President Smith also pointed to “the agrarian doctrines 
which find embodiment in various social organizations in 
the free States.” 

Nothing but that religion which both teaches the duty and imparts 
the moral power to “be careful for nothing, but in everything to give 
thanks,” and in every condition in which Divine Providence places 
us, “therewith to be content,” can reconcile a white menial to his 
condition in such a country as ours . 3 

Dew had pointed out the logic of the situation as early 
as 1836: 

Domestic slavery, such as ours, is the only institution which I 
know of that can secure the spirit of equality among free men, so neces¬ 
sary to the true and genuine feeling of republicanism, without pro¬ 
pelling the body politic at the same time into the dangerous vices of 

1 Governor Hammond's Letters on Southern Slavery; Addressed to Thomas 

Clarkson, the English Abolitionist (1845), pp. 5, 6. 

3 Mill, Slavery: a Treatise, pp. 33-34* 

3 Smith, Lectures on the Philosophy and Practice of Slavery, pp. 222-23. 




agrarianism and legislative intermeddling between the laborer and the 
capitalist . 1 

A worthy South Carolina clergyman restated Dew’s proposi¬ 
tion of eliminating the conflict of interest between capital 
and labor by making labor and capital one and the same, as 
follows: 

The institution of slavery, then, ever has been and ever will be 
the only sure foundation of all Republican governments. And its 
conservative influence in favor of republicanism does not consist 
chiefly in the curtailment of universal suffrage, but in the almost 
unobserved fact of uniting capital and labor. It is this peaceful trait 
of the institution of slavery that constitutes it a leading ingredient in 

the best social state.For where this sort of slavery exists as the 

basis of the social state, all clashing between capitalists and laborers 
is excluded and the wheels of government work smoothly; and con¬ 
tentment and peace must be most likely to reign in the bosom of such 
society . 2 

Such southern spokesmen hailed the argument of an English 
student of economics and sociology that “ slavery and con¬ 
tent, and liberty and discontent, are the natural results of 
each other,” that the only way to solve the complicated 
problems of modern industrial society would be to enslave 
all the people who did not possess property. 3 

President Dew, the pioneer in this field and doubtless the 
ablest of this group of philosophers, was fully alive to the 
revolutionary implications of his defense of slavery. In an 
address published in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1836, 


1 Southern Literary Messenger , II, 277. 

2 He prophesied on this basis the predestined failure of the French Republic 
and of the non-slaveholding states if controlled by the friends of freedom. “A 
Defense of Southern Slavery against the Attacks of Henry Clay and Alexander 
Campbell,” by a southern clergyman (Hamburg, South Carolina, 1851), pp. 44, 45. 

3 See “Slavery, the Only Remedy for the Miseries of the English Poor,” by 
“a philanthropist,” from J err old's Magazine , in Fitzhugh, Cannibals Alll or, Slaves 
without Masters, pp. 228, 233. 


22 




he forecasts the spread of slavery into the West and North 
and concludes: 

Expediency, morality and religion alike demand its continuance; 
and perhaps I would not hazard too much in the prediction that the 
day will come when the whole confederacy [the United States] will 
regard it as the sheet anchor of our country’s liberty . 1 

Dew too thought that the whole country must become “all 
slave or all free,” but he thought the outcome would be the 
genera] prevalence of slavery. 

This fundamental philosphy of the southern intelligentsia 
was taken up and popularized by the more agressive political 
leaders of the South, especially by those of the school of 
Rhett, Yancey, and Davis. Like the philosophers, the poli¬ 
ticians considered that the best defensive tactics for the 
South were those of a vigorous offensive. This gospel was 
preached from the stump, in legislative halls, and at times 
even from the gubernatorial chair. The conservative 
southern planter might continue to pride himself on his con¬ 
servative opposition to agitation, but the clamor for a more 
adequate recognition of southern rights was raised with 
increasing vigor and intensity as the sectional controversy 
approached the crisis of i860. 

Perhaps the most versatile and the most provocative of 
these southern spokesmen in the fifties was George Fitzhugh, 
of Port Caroline, Virginia. Residing in the rural isolation 
of a small community in tidewater Virginia, he courageously 
took up the cudgel and assumed an offensive in behalf of the 
“peculiar institution” of the South quite without a parallel 
in the antebellum period. He must at length be accredited 
with his proper role in the slavery controversy. 2 In the 

1 Southern Literary Messenger, II, 277; W. E. Dodd, “Contributions of the 
South to Economic Thought and Writing to 1865,” South in the Building of the 
Nation , V, 571. 

2 Such standard writers as James Ford Rhodes and Albert Bushnell Hart 
(in his Slavery and Abolition ) fail even to mention Fitzhugh and his writings. 


23 



early forties he “ became satisfied that slavery, black or 
white , was right and necessary.’ 5 He was soon advocating 
“this doctrine in very many essays; sometimes editorially 
[as a newspaper publisher] and sometimes as a communi¬ 
cant.” 1 He undertook to arouse the South into taking 
“higher ground in defense of Slavery; justifying it as a nor¬ 
mal and natural institution, instead of excusing and apologiz¬ 
ing for it, as an exceptional one.” 2 A series of his articles 
appeared, 1849-51, in the Fredericksburg Democratic Recorder 
and in the Richmond Examiner; these he brought together 
and circulated in pamphlet form under the title, “Slavery 
Justified.” Next he brought out, in 1854, his Sociology for 
the South , dedicated “To the People of the South,” and finally 
in 1857, his Cannibals All! or Slaves without Masters , dedi¬ 
cated to Governor Henry A. Wise, of Virginia. 

He professed the greatest respect for the abolitionists, 
whose sincerity and ability he ungrudgingly acknowledged. 
In his visits to the North he established friendly personal 
relations with Gerrit Smith, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, 
and other antislavery crusaders. Indeed, he states that in 
his visit of 1855 he “only associated with distinguished 
Abolitionists.” 3 He read “many of their books, lectures, 
essays, and speeches,” and published his letter of regrets 
to William Lloyd Garrison that “your very able paper 
reaches me irregularly.” 4 “The Liberty party is composed 
of very able men—of philosophers and philanthropists,” 
he told his fellow-southrons; he was indebted to these 
reformers, he shrewdly pointed out, because “they have 
demonstrated, beyond a doubt, that slavery is necessary, 
unless they can get up a Millennium, or discover a new Social 
Science.” 5 In other words, he applauded and accepted 
their socialistic indictment of the general prevalence of 

1 Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, p. 225. 3 Fitzhugh, ibid., p. xvi. 

2 Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! p. xiii. * Ibid., p. 154. s Ibid., p. 147. 


24 



slavery, including “ slavery to capital,” but rejected their 
remedy as absurd and impracticable. “ Their destructive 
philosophy is profound, demonstrative, and unanswerable—- 
their constructive theories, wild, visionary, and chimerical 
on paper, and failures in practice.” 1 Writing to one of those 
reformers whose attention had been drawn to Fitzhugh’s 
publications by citations in northern papers, the nimble 
southern protagonist applied the logic of this argument: 
“ Should you not, therefore, abolish your form of society, 
and adopt ours, until Mr. Greeley, or Brigham Young, or 
Mr. Andrews, or Mr. Goodell, or some other socialist of 
Europe or America, invents and puts into successful practice 
a social organization better than either, or until the millen- 
ium [sic\ does actually arrive ?” 2 Or, as he more boldly and 
perhaps more ironically put it in another connection: 
“ Slavery is a form of communism, and as the Abolitionists 
and Socialists have resolved to adopt a new social system, 
we recommend it to their consideration.” 3 

Yet, knowing that the abolitionists were sincerely 
attached to their ideals, Fitzhugh accorded them recognition 
as honest and worthy opponents. “We live in a dangerous 
crisis,” he wrote Garrison, “and every patriot and philan¬ 
thropist should set aside all false delicacy in the earnest 
pursuit of truth. I believe Slavery natural, necessary, indis¬ 
pensable. You think it inexpedient, immoral, and criminal. 
Neither of us should withhold any facts that will enable the 
public to form correct opinions.” 4 He frankly warned the 
northern propagandist that his new book was about to 
demonstrate “that every theoretical abolitionist at the North 
is a Socialist or Communist, and proposes or approves radi- 

1 Ibid., p. 34. 

2 Ibid., p. 153. He concluded with the assurance: “I am quite as intent on 
abolishing Free Society, as you are on abolishing slavery.” 

3 Ibid., p. 324. 4 Ibid., p. 154. 


25 



cal changes in the organization of society.” 1 He served the 
same notice upon Horace Greeley and challenged him to 
correct any specious reasoning. “ J Tis not possible that our 

two forms of society can long coexist.Social systems, 

formed on opposite principles, cannot endure,” 2 he concluded, 
forecasting the message with which Lincoln was to startle 
the world less than two years later. 

In picturing the cause of the abolitionist as logically a 
crusade for social revolution, North as well as South, Fitz- 
hugh sought to arouse the northern capitalist to a sense of 
the essential community of interest between the vested 
interests of the nation, regardless of section. “Have we 
not shown .... that the North has as much to apprehend 
from abolition as the South, and that it is time for conser¬ 
vatives everywhere to unite in efforts to suppress and extin¬ 
guish it?” 3 he asked. He elaborated this point in a final 
chapter entitled, “Warning to the North.” He insisted: 

A like danger threatens North and South, proceeding from the 
same source. Abolitionism is maturing what Political Economy began. 
. . . . Men once fairly committed to negro slavery agitation—once 
committed to the sweeping principle, “that man being a moral agent, 
accountable to God for his actions, should not have those actions con¬ 
trolled and directed by the will of another,” are, in effect, committed 
to Socialism and communism, to the most ultra doctrines of Garrison, 
Goodell, Smith and Andrews—to no private property, no church, no 
law, no government—to free love, free lands, free women and free 
churches . 4 

1 Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! p. 154. 2 Ibid., p. 155. 3 Ibid., p. 144. 

4 Ibid., pp. 359, 368. It is significant that this danger of revolution was 
pointed out by other southerners. “It is not the South alone that is interested 
in this momentous question. The same torch (lit by abolitionists of the North) 
that will consume our humble cottages of the South will also cause the North¬ 
eastern horizon to corruscate with the flames of Northern palaces,” wrote W. H. 
Underwood to Howell Cobb, February 4, 1844. U. B. Phillips [ed.j, Correspond¬ 
ence of Toombs, Stephens, and Cobb, American Historical Association Report, 1911, 
Washington, 1913, II, 54. D. R. Hundley, in his Social Relations of our Southern 
States (New York, i860), pp. 281-82, issued a warning to the northern capitalist 
that, in sympathizing with the antislavery movement, he was harboring “an 

26 



His warning shifted into another appeal for common cause: 

In the South, the interest of the governing class is eminently con¬ 
servative, and the South is fast becoming the most conservative of 

nations.We think that by a kind of alliance, offensive and 

defensive, with the South, Northern Conservatism may now arrest 
and turn back the tide of Radicalism and Agrarianism . * 1 

He held that there was only one kind of force that would 
sustain a government—inside necessity,’ such as slavery, 
that occasions a few to usurp power, and to hold it forcibly, 

without consulting the many.The mass of mankind 

cannot be governed by Law. More of despotic discretion, 
and less of Law, is what the world wants.” 2 Again, Fitz- 
hugh was moved to proclaim a “house divided” doctrine: 
“ There is no middle ground—not an inch of ground of any 
sort, between that doctrine which we hold and those which 
Mr. Garrison holds. If slavery, either white or black, be 
wrong in principle or practice, then is Mr. Garrison right— 
then is all human government wrong.” 3 Or, as he had stated 
the case in 1854: 

We deem this peculiar question of negro slavery of very little 
importance. The issue is made throughout the world on the general 
subject of slavery in the abstract. The argument has commenced. 
One set of ideas will govern and control after awhile the civilized world. 
Slavery will everywhere be abolished, or everywhere be re-instituted . 4 

Here was a bold spirit, ready to combat abolitionism by 
attacking the very foundations of free society. Here was a 
direct proposal to the vested interests of the North to assume 
an allied offensive against “northern radicalism.” And 

adder that in time will turn upon you and sting you.You in urging the 

rights of negro slave workmen are giving arguments which will react upon you as 

employers of white ‘free’ workmen in the North.Unconsciously to yourself 

you have been advocating all the time only a new species of agrarianism. Your 
laborers already wonder, why you so rich and they so poor ? What will you do 
when they demand equal distribution of wealth with you?” 

1 Ibid., pp. 356-57. 3 Ibid., pp. 360-61. 3 Ibid., p. 368. 

4 Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, p. 94. 


27 







Fitzhugh was only one of many such protagonists of slavery. 
The average slaveholder might content himself with defend¬ 
ing his property in slaves by pointing to the obvious apparent 
inferiority of the Negro race; but Fitzhugh and his associates 
insisted upon carrying out the theories of Dew to their 
logical conclusion. On the basis of logic and of scriptural 
and historical precedent, they were vindicating the institu¬ 
tion of slavery in the abstract, with little of special pleading 
for negro servitude. They exerted a powerful influence upon 
the South. Fitzhugh’s contributions were published in the 
Richmond Enquirer , in De Bow’s Review , in the Southern 
Literary Messenger , and extensively in citation. His Sociol¬ 
ogy for the South was reviewed by his friend, Professor H., of 
Virginia, in the Literary Messenger for March, 1855. The 
essays of Dew, Harper, Simms, and others were gathered 
together and published in 1852 in a volume entitled The 
Pro-slavery Argument; it was given wide circulation over the 
South. Eight years later a similar compilation, entitled 
Cotton Is King , was issued to the public. Informally the 
new pro-slavery propaganda was taken up in the southern 
press and exploited in new terms and in new forms. 

Meantime, no adequate refutation had come from across 
Mason and Dixon’s line. Fitzhugh sent his letters and pub¬ 
lications into the North with his stirring challenge. He 
restated it in articles in the New York Day Book. He went to 
Yale in 1856 and lectured with some acclaim on the failure of 
free society. And still no response! He commented in 1856: 

Piqued and taunted for two years by many Southern Presses of 
standing, to deny the proposition that Free Society in Western Europe 
is a failure, and that it betrays premonitory symptoms of failure even 
in America, the North is silent, and thus tacitly admits the charge . 1 

1 Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! p. xv. The real explanation of this silence is prob¬ 
ably to be found in the fact that the pro-slavery argument still attracted relatively 
little attention out of the limits of the slaveholding states themselves. See com¬ 
plaint of Chancellor Harper, Pro-slavery Argument , p. 2. 


28 



The North was not entirely silent. Indeed, it was 
becoming aroused by these taunts as all the efforts of the 
abolitionists had failed to arouse it. The abolitionists had 
early recognized, as Birney put it, that the real issue at stake 
as much concerned the white man and his hope of continued 
liberty as it did the liberation of the enslaved African, that 
the enslavement of one race involved the ultimate essential 
enslavement of the other. 1 The idealistic reformers, on the 
one hand, and the spokesman of class-conscious labor, on 
the other, had long insisted upon the common enemy of 
“wages slavery and chattel slavery.” Indeed, a Horace 
Greeley could feel justified in abstaining from participation 
in a certain antislavery meeting because its backers seemed 
to fail to oppose slavery in all its forms. 2 But while visionary 
labor leaders and reformers might even consider that the 
problem of “wages slavery” was as serious as that of negro 
slavery, this was the ineffective appeal of abstract logic to 
the average citizen of the North; it was readily discounted 
as part of the propaganda of misguided fanatics. 

Quite different was the response when the northerner was 
brought face to face with a southern argument to subject 
all labor to servile exploitation. None the less abstract, 
he could envisage this danger. It mattered not that a logi¬ 
cian like Fitzhugh could explain that slavery for whites 
would be milder than negro slavery, and intended for the 
protection of the less fortunate social groups—that it could 
be no worse than northern industrialism, and ought to involve 
a paternalistic improvement. 3 Nor was the southern popu- 
larizer of Fitzhugh likely to make such distinctions. Accord- 

1 Jesse Macy, The Anti-slavery Crusade , p. 67. Fitzhugh declared that social 
revolution was their “real object—negro emancipation a mere gull-trap.”— Canni¬ 
bals All! pp. 368, 369. 

2 John R. Commons, Documentary History of American Industrial Society 
(n vols., Cleveland, 1910-n), VII, 211-16. Cf. also ibid., pp. 351-52. 

3 Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South , pp. 94—955 Cannibals All! p. 359 ’ 


29 



ingly, the warning in the North was sounded in the election 
of 1856, the first test in national politics of the Republican 
Party. The northern press reprinted with warning finger 
the ultra pro-slavery arguments. Pamphlets appeared 
with quotations from the southern press. 1 One of wide cir¬ 
culation was entitled: “The new 1 Democratic ’ doctrine . 
Slavery not to be confined to the negro race, but to be made the 
universal condition of the laboring classes of society. The 
supporters of this doctrine vote for Buchanan! ” 

Lincoln’s warning of 1852 against pro-slavery propagan¬ 
dists who were ready to assail “the white man’s charter of 
freedom” is one of the earliest instances of northern anxiety 
over the position of the southern extremists. He must have 
been keenly sensitive to these forces that were beginning to 
operate in the South; his mind seems to have dwelt often 
in the years that followed upon the problem that was thus 
raised. Lincoln’s interest in the slavery controversy led to 
a careful consideration of the literature on both sides. 
Herndon preserves the following pregnant facts: 

Lincoln and I took such papers as the Chicago Tribune , New 
York Tribune , Anti-Slavery Standard , Emancipator , and National Era. 
On the other side of the question we took the Charleston Mercury and 
the Richmond Enquirer. I also bought a book called “Sociology/’ 
written by one Fitzhugh, which defended and justified slavery in 
every conceivable way. In addition I purchased all the leading 
histories of the slavery movement, and other works which treated 
on that subject. Lincoln himself never bought many books, but he 
and I read those I have named . 2 

The specific mention of Fitzhugh and his Sociology for 
the South probably reflects the strong impress made upon 
Herndon and his law partner by the drastic logic of the 
southern protagonist. 

1 Frank T. Carleton, Organized Labor in American History (New York, 1920), 
p. 147. 

2 Herndon and Weik, Herndon’s Lincoln , II, 363. 


30 



The warnings of the Republican press and of party 
pamphleteers doubtless re-enforced Lincoln’s reactions to 
the doctrines of southern extremists. The material had 
come too closely to hand to fail to influence the enthusiastic 
champion of the American gospel of liberty. Numerous 
examples of the southern philosophy of class superiority 
were clipped by the Republican editors in Illinois, on 
the assumption that they contained their own refutation, 
and that their arrogance would do damage to the southern 
cause. As early as March of 1854 the Belleville Advocate 
had called attention to an address by Taber, one of the 
editors of the Charleston Mercury , in which he had held 
up slavery as the natural and best condition of labor, 
and had pointed to France and the northern states as 
instancing the necessity of slavery in republics; the Advocate 
rejoiced in the news that Taber had been honored in return 
by being burned in effigy by the indignant mechanics of the 
capital of his own state. Other items appeared in the course 
of the campaign of 1856 when Lincoln was busy on the hust¬ 
ings in behalf of the Republican candidate. 1 

Shortly before the Lincoln-Douglas contest of 1858, Lin¬ 
coln’s home paper, the Springfield Illinois Slate Journal , 
began to take up this line of attack. In a single issue of 
October 28, 1857, the Journal submitted an alleged South 
Carolina journalistic effort and an item purporting to come 
from the well-known Richmond Enquirer. Said the former: 

Slavery is the natural and normal condition of the laboring man, 
whether white or black. The great evil of Northern free society is 
that it is burdened with a servile class of mechanics and laborers, unfit 
for self-government, and yet clothed with the attributes and powers 
of citizens. Master and slave is a relation in society as natural and 
necessary as parent and child; and the Northern States will yet have 
to introduce it. 


1 See Marshall, Eastern Illinoisan , May 24; Chicago Daily Democratic Press, 
June 2, 1856. 


3 i 



The Enquirer article supported the same view: 

Until recently the defense of slavery has labored under great diffi¬ 
culties, because its apologists took half-way grounds. They confined 
the defense of slavery to mere negro slavery, thereby giving up the 
principle, admitting other forms of slavery to be wrong. 

The line of defense, however, is now changed. The South now 
maintains that slavery is right, natural and necessary, and does not 
depend upon the difference in complexion. The laws of the slave 
States justify the holding of white men in bondage . 1 

Here was certainly an echo of the doctrine of Dew and 
Fitzhugh. But the danger was more than a mere figment 
of the now supersensitized imaginations of Republican poli¬ 
ticians. To be sure, the issue would become serious only 
when northerners would take up the cudgel for this southern 
doctrine. But that moment seemed at hand. On Septem¬ 
ber 16, 1854, Dumas J. Van Deren, of Charleston, Illinois, 
forwarded a communication to the Charleston (S.C.) Courier 
in which he declared himself and many other southerners, 
resident in Illinois long enough to test the comparative 
advantages that free and slave systems present, 

prepared to pronounce openly our full and candid preference in favor 


of slave labor in agricultural business.We have discovered 

that the novelty of free labor is a mere humbug.We have been 


endeavoring to learn the sentiments of our people upon this subject, 
and have been astonished to see with what unanimity they express 
themselves in favor of the introduction of slave labor. I have con¬ 
versed with many of our best farmers who were raised in the eastern 
States, and they will give their hearty co-operation in effecting this 
object. 

He therefore proposed to carry this question to the ballot 
box in a movement to repeal the slavery prohibition of the 

1 The same item was clipped by the Chicago Daily Democratic Press, June 2, 
1856, supposedly from the Marshall Eastern Illinoisan , May 24, where it appeared 
as an unidentified contribution. These editorials were published in one of the 
pamphlets used as campaign documents by the Republicans. See Carleton 
Organized Labor in American History , p. 147. 


32 





state constitution. He called upon southerners to turn emi¬ 
grants to Illinois, instead of Kansas: “Send your young men 

here, who can remain here and vote.If by our united 

efforts we shall be able to carry our point, the southern people 
will possess the key to the western world, the richest portion 
of the American continent.” 

This letter was widely copied, in southern journals and 
in northern antislavery organs. The Jackson Mississippian 
welcomed Van Deren’s proposal. It declared: 

Establish slavery in Illinois and it would give us the key to the great 
West. The South should not content herself with maintaining her 
ground; she should progress. She should expand her institutions 
wherever soil, climate, and productions are adapted to them . 1 

In the spring of 1858, Van Deren became editor of the 
Matoon National Gazette , an administration, anti-Douglas 
organ. It was not long before the Republican press was 
again able to proclaim him as the advocate of slavery in 
Illinois. The Illinois State Journal promptly quoted two 
items. In one Van Deren submitted: 

We candidly and firmly believe today that if Illinois were a slave 
state, the best men of Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, and even states 
farther South, would be here as soon as they could remove their families, 
and the prairies of Illinois would be made to smile as a lovely garden . 2 

Lincoln, seeking an opportunity to return from his politi¬ 
cal seclusion, must thoughtfully have studied all these devel¬ 
opments. He, a believer in the dignity of labor and in the 
rights of labor, sympathized with the growing feeling of 
northern wage-earners that slavery was a menace to them 

1 Mississippian, October 20, in Alton Weekly Courier, November 30, 1854. 

2 See Illinois State Journal, August 26, September 2, 1857. Cf. Urbana 
Union, April 30, August 20, 27, October 29, 1857. The resourcefulness of the 
Republican press seemed to limit its use of this opportunity to the charge that 
Van Deren’s appeal was the logical position of all responsible elements in the 
Democratic Party, even in the North; this charge a number of Democratic organs 
promptly refuted. 


> ) 


33 





individually and as a class. He was also no mean political 
strategist. His Springfield speech accepting the Republican 
senatorial nomination was a carefully prepared effort, but 
directed, in its formal logic, against the leadership of Douglas 
—so much so that he failed to make entirely clear what 
might have been the implications of his “house divided” 
reference. If a sense of the larger conflict between slavery 
and freedom served as a subconscious factor in Lincoln’s 
historic statement, he did not recur to it in the formal utter¬ 
ances of the campaign. In the less formal phase of his work 
on the hustings, however—in his tour of the towns and vil¬ 
lages of Illinois—he addressed the electorate without the 
complicating presence of his great rival. There he had an 
opportunity to make use of the contents of a campaign note¬ 
book filled with newspaper clippings; among other items he 
had filed away in this scrapbook a number of the ultra- 
pro-slavery items clipped from the Illinois State Journal! 
He was closely in touch with the editorial policy of the Jour¬ 
nal , and he may even have inspired the republication of the 
alleged outbursts of southern fanaticism. At any rate, the 
evidence points to a frequent and effective exploitation of 
such items before the voters of Illinois. 1 2 

In the stirring events of the years that followed, Lincoln 
faced in a more concrete way the issues of the sectional con¬ 
troversy. But in his first annual message of December 3, 
1861, he turned to the fundamental issues of the war that 
was raging: 


1 This campaign notebook is now in the possession of Mr. Jesse Weik of Green- 
castle, Indiana, and throws interesting light on this question. See Weik, The 
Real Lincoln , a Portrait (Boston, 1922), pp. 9-11, 

2 In October, at the very climax of the Lincoln-Douglas contest, an article 
appeared in De Bow's Review urging the reopening of the slave trade and “the 
introduction of our peculiar institution into western States and Territories.”— 
De Bow's Review, XXV, 393 ff. The Illinois State Journal promptly, on Nov¬ 
ember 3, 1858, brought this article to the attention of the excited electorate. 


34 



It continues to develop that the insurrection is largely, if not 
exclusively, a war upon the principle of popular government—the 

rights of the people.It is not needed nor fitting here that a 

general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions; 
but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most 
others, to which I ask brief attention. It is the effort to place capital 
on an equal footing, if not above, labor, in the structure of government. 
It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; 
that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow 
by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next consid¬ 
ered whether it is best that capital should hire laborers, and thus 
induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them, and drive 
them to it without their consent. Having proceeded thus far, it is 
naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what 
we call slaves. And, further, it is assumed that whoever is once a 
hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life. 

Now, there is no such relation between capital and labor as 
assumed, nor is there such a thing as a free man being fixed for life in 
the condition of a hired laborer. Both assumptions are false, and all 
inferences from them are groundless. 

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the 
fruit of labor and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. 
Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consid¬ 
eration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as 
any other rights. 1 

On March 21, 1864, in accepting honorary membership 
in a workingmen’s association of New York, Lincoln wel¬ 
comed the recognition of the principle “that the existing 
rebellion means more, and tends to more, than the perpetua¬ 
tion of African slavery—that it is, in fact, a war upon the 
rights of all workingmen.” 2 He quoted at length his message 
of 1861 as evidence of his belief in that principle; later in 
his letter he stated: “The strongest bond of human sym¬ 
pathy, outside of the family relation, should be one uniting 
all working people, of all nations and tongues, and kindreds.” 


1 Nicolay and Hay, op. cit., II, 104-5. 2 Ibid-t PP- 5 QI 2 * 


35 




If one takes Lincoln’s “house divided” analogy and sets 
it alongside of similar expressions emanating from ultra- 
pro-slavery propagandists, it seems to raise a fundamental 
issue of class relationships. As a simple excursion into the 
realm of prophecy bearing upon the institution of domestic 
slavery it was fulfilled in less than a decade. But is the 
historical student of today able to assign to Lincoln a larger 
importance in this role as prophet? Was Lincoln also 
accepting the challenge of the southron’s “class struggle” 
concept to the extent of restating that social philosophy in 
terms that would reach the understanding—and fears—of 
the humble citizen of the North? Time may bring an 
answer to this pregnant question, just as it may accomplish 
something toward an adequate solution of the larger riddle 
of the “ class struggle.” Is it, meantime, too much to ask 
whether Lincoln may not have made a contribution to the 
historical development of this unorthodox philosophy of 
history ? 


P D 62 


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